Journalismiziko

KZN HOSTS SUCCESSFUL YOUTH CONFERENCE

The youth of Durban were given an inspirational address at the Transformers & Pioneers Youth Leaders conference held at the Pavilion Hotel last Friday.

The aim of the conference was to empower the youth in various sectors as well as to try and find solutions for different issues that affect the youth.

Lindo Khoza, one of the organisers said that they were pleased with the conference turnout and they believe that it was a success.

“I think we were able to achieve the main goal of this conference which was to address the issues affecting the youth in our province. Out of the 50 delegates that we had invited, 47 showed up and they did as they were requested, that alone shows us how important this was,” he said.

Different speakers addressed various socio-economic issues such as health, crime and education.

Sthandiwe Shandu from the Department of Social Development urged the youth to work with government in order for them to be able to be assisted in whatever difficulty they are facing.

She said that as the department they cannot just go to a certain area not knowing the exact issues that young people are having difficulty with.

“We cannot go to an area and address an issue that does not affect them. For example, imagine us going to KwaMashu to talk about teenage pregnancy whereas the issue at hand is drug addiction among young people. That is why we need people to interact with us to keep us updated about the problems affecting them directly,” she said.

Amongst the speakers was William Zenzile from the eThekwini Municipality who was there to inform people how to tackle socio-economic issues in KwaZulu-Natal.

He talked on the fact that Africans always blame apartheid for the lack of opportunities and encouraged them to stop.

“We cannot shy away from the fact that apartheid is the reason for our current situation, but it will be a problem for the next generation if we continue with this pattern of always shifting the blame to our past experience as a nation,” he said.

Khoza affirmed everyone present that this was just a start there is a lot yet to come.

“This was just a beginning, we are going to have seminars where will be talking about the way forward as to how we will go about in making sure that our young people are benefitting from government,” Khoza said.